Monday, April 18, 2016

The Socialist Case Against Bernie

18 April 2016

By Molly Ball
The Atlantic 

"American socialists have never gotten far. Their heyday, insofar as they had one, was in the early 20th century, under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs—whose likeness hangs in Sanders’s Senate office. Debs’s fourth presidential run, in 1912, earned the Socialist Party of America 6 percent of the vote, still the high-water mark for a socialist candidacy; his successor, Norman Thomas, never came close to such popularity in his six presidential runs, and the party fell apart under the scrutiny of the Red Scare. In the 1970s, a few successor parties emerged, among them Socialist Party USA, whose 1976 nominee, the socialist former Milwaukee mayor, Frank Zeidler, got just over 6,000 votes. (While that party today claims to adhere to democratic socialism, it, too, finds Sanders insufficient: In the view of Mimi Soltysik, its 2016 nominee, Sanders’s rhetoric about the middle class is “bullshit.”)"

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